David Remnick: 'New Yorker' stories

Did you know when you were younger that you wanted to be a writer or reporter?

Yes. I was a perfectly fine student, but one of the formative things, other than the usual, was that I had a very good friend. Often what shapes a kid will be some friend he or she looks into, and I had this friend by about seventh or eighth grade. I was 12 or 13. We were listening to things like Bob Dylan. That was fine, but he didn't just strike us as a great pop musician or a songwriter. You listened to Bob Dylan and all of a sudden he was mentioning things like T S Eliot or Rimbaud, and I thought, "OK, that's something I should know". I'd go to a bookstore and buy Eliot's or Rimbaud's poems. Of course, I had no idea what these things were about.

I couldn't make heads or tails out of them. I'm a firm believer that pretentiousness in a kid is the parent of actual reading or actual ambition or interest. If I come across a kid who's 12 or 13, who seems a little pretentious and doesn't really quite know what he or she is talking about, I think that's OK. It means they're interested. They know there's something there that they should look into. And so reading spread out like that, and the notion of writing and doing this thing - whether imaginatively or as a journalist - bloomed very early.

You got a job at The Washington Post right after college?

I did. I went to a fancy school in college. God knows why. But I got a lot out of it. Instead of waiting on tables and doing the usual things you do in college in your spare time, if you have any, I got a job as a stringer in a stringer organisation at Princeton called the Press Club. And so I was a stringer for all kinds of newspapers. The Princeton paper had good stories in it, but it wasn't worth having a full-time correspondent, so they relied on a stringer organisation. I sold a story about a dinosaur-egg hunter to The Washington Post, and that helped me to get a summer internship. I did that twice and I was stuck. They were kind of stuck with me.

Did you leave the newspaper business because you wanted to work on books and magazines?

I left The Washington Post not because I was unhappy but because I suspected that I had the best job I was ever going to have in newspapers. I got offered a job at The New Yorker. It wasn't a hard decision. It was apples and oranges. It was time for oranges. It wasn't as if I was going from the Post to The New York Times, which would have been apples to apples.

You wrote for all different sections of the newspaper. Did that diversity lead you to where you are today as a reporter and editor?

No, it's just indicative of the lack of concentration in any one area. It might be my worst quality as a journalist, and it might be something halfway decent, in that I don't specialise in tax reform or Russia, or any of the subjects that I alight upon once in a while. The world is complicated and wonderful and terrifying, and sooner or later you want to examine various corners of it. At the Post, the ambition was to cover politics. It's a company town. Not only was that not for me, nobody asked me to. I was always at the fringes for the first six years, until I moved to Moscow.

You were there, of course, at an interesting time in history

That's why I went. If you're a journalist now - Iraq is so dangerous that I don't know how many people really want to go. It's so depressing. Imagine a story of even greater magnitude that wasn't dangerous, that changed the world for ever, and you're one of two correspondents for The Washington Post to cover this story. It stretched across 10 time zones and 15 republics or potential countries. It had implications all over the world. It changed everything. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the biggest event in the world since the end of the Second World War. So, not to want to get up close would have been insane.

I discovered at the Post that when they post on the bulletin board, "Who wants to go to Moscow?", it usually means it's already taken. The fix is in. So I put myself forward. I thought, "Well, the fix is in this time, but maybe four years from now I'll have a shot". But the fix wasn't in that time, because going to Moscow is a complicated thing: it's freezing cold, the food is lousy, it's very far away. It was even further away then because communications weren't what they are now. There were no satellite phones, no internet, no e-mail. There were East German telex machines. So you felt very, very far away. And I have to tell you that I loved every single day of it. There are days when I miss it.

The New Yorker is probably the best place I can think of, where you're writing something for a periodical yet it has a timeless quality as well

That's the hope. The book takes its title from Lillian Ross - a book of hers called Reporting. Those are New Yorker pieces. Roger Angell does it all the time, as does Adam Gopnik. Some people take things that they've written in The New Yorker and then expand on them or work with them. Bill Buford has recently done this with a book called Heat. Certainly, many of the seeds of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point are pieces from The New Yorker. Susan Orlean, Mark Singer - there are many others.

Your editorship at The New Yorker - 8-plus years, five people - four men, one woman. It's kind of an unprecedented magazine in terms of stewardship. What was your initial reaction, having never held an editing position?

It was like being thrown into the ocean. It seems like a long time ago - the way those moments do in your life that are disorienting or even dramatic. You have to get your head above water because, you know what- the magazine has to come out next week and the next week and the week after. You have to figure out what you're going to be as an editor, or how you're going to do this.

I had very little idea, and only one thing made it all possible - two things, actually. One is the fact that there was already in place, and I thank Tina Brown enormously for this, a set of editors at the top of the magazine who are here to this day for good reason and are remarkable. Dorothy Wickenden, Pam McCarthy, Susan Morrison. They made it possible to get by, week to week. I learnt enormously from them. Secondly, I was not a writer who was made anxious by editing. It's like a set of ideal readers. The other thing that made it possible to do this, having never been an editor, was the absolute quiet and steady support of the ownership of the magazine. I think in other circumstances, you could be made a nervous wreck by the feeling that someone is looking over your shoulder all the time or is impatient for results - whether they're commercial results or editorial results. I felt none of that. I felt - and to this day feel - an absolute love of the magazine and support from it. You can take that as the sycophancy of an editor or you can take it as the truth. I'm asking you to believe the latter.

I never met [Harold] Ross or [William] Shawn, but I know Bob Gottlieb a little bit. I know Tina Brown well. I'm sure we're all utterly different. Ross holds a special place because he invented this thing. It would be foolish not to give him pride of place, and Shawn as well, for deepening the magazine and being the editor for so bloody long. I don't like people who complain about their very wonderful jobs in public when they're lucky to have them. It's an absolute privilege to be able to edit this magazine. Shawn and Ross must have had extraordinary mental endurance and, I hope, joy in doing this thing. I have the joy - yes. Endurance, we'll see.

It seems like a labour of love kind of editing job, especially since you still write for the magazine

I don't write so much.

Maybe compared with past editors?

None of them wrote. Well, that's not exactly true. With Ross, if you really dig deep into our library, he co-wrote certain Talk of the Towns. I think Shawn had one Talk of the Town - one short piece with his name on it. Bob Gottlieb is now a writer. He's a critic and writes for us and The New York Review of Books and the New York Observer. His reputation came from being a book editor. And Tina Brown, as a very young woman, wrote some kind of light and lively things, but for the most part was not known as a writer. Now she's actually writing quite a wonderful column that was running in The Washington Post until she took a book leave to write about Diana, Princess of Wales. I get to be me with all its grave limitations.

And there were other editors of magazines who wrote. Hendrik Hertzberg and Michael Kinsley both wrote when they were editors of The New Republic. Lewis Lapham wrote for Harper's. You do what you can do.

Is it something you grapple with, where you'd like to write something yourself but assign it instead to someone else?

I think it took some time to figure out how to do it in a way where the writing would be good and it wouldn't interfere with the magazine, or anybody's notion of the magazine. It took a while to find the right balance, and the balance really is that I write pieces twice a year.

You have a sense of humour - you're down to earth - and that's something I don't think most people sense when they're reading The New Yorker. Do people assume that you're going to be this very shy, intellectual type because of The New Yorker's reputation?

I don't know. I think it's been an awfully long time since the majority of the readership of The New Yorker saw it as something in which there was a cult-like status of the editor. I'm not so sure in this day and age you could maintain such a thing, and I'm not sure it was so wonderful to begin with. I guess it was pretty hard on the object of that interest. I think we know what we're talking about. William Shawn didn't go out much. He didn't travel and he had certain phobias. My guess is that those were all very painful to him. The important thing about him was that he was an editorial genius. He was a great nurturer of the talents around him.

I think that what you do as an editor is go out and try to support the writers and artists you believe in, and keep looking for more artists and writers you can get behind, and let them do what they know how to do. I don't want to be faux naïf about this. In many ways, the magazine that we're publishing every week reflects what I want to read or what the people around me - this group of editors - find amusing or deep, or funny, or intelligent or whatever. That's a big role, and I don't want to dismiss it. It's very important. People don't come to read the editor; they come to read Anthony Lane or Joan Acocella or whoever it is.

How did you get Seymour Hersh to do more writing for The New Yorker?

The trick with Sy Hersh is trying to figure out what was the best use of his time, particularly after 11 September 2001. We talked that very day. And I think I said to him, "I guess we know what you'll be doing for the next five, 10 years." He's been doing it heroically ever since. I'm sure that at some point, Sy will take six months or a year to do one big project. But the nature of events has made that more difficult.

Sy's from Chicago. His father ran a dry cleaners. His parents were immigrants. Sy Hersh is as if you could harness the net energies of a volcano or a hurricane and put them in a rumpled suit. That's what Sy Hersh is. Sy knows that a huge percentage of reporting is sheer persistence, being adamant, showing up and all the rest, coupled with a kind of intelligence. He's amazing.

Yet Hersh is hardly the only investigative reporter we have. Last year, Jane Mayer really, in my mind, set the agenda on the use of torture by the United States in Iraq and elsewhere. Whereas George Packer is somebody who has reporting chops in terms of intellectual background and a policy background on Iraq, but he's also on the ground, so he's doing something different as well.

As the myth goes, does The New Yorker actually have piles of manuscripts sitting around?

No. The myth and the reality is that we are sent hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts, especially fiction and poetry, every week and we read them. Now, the top fiction editor is not reading everything that's sent from every corner of the country, but certainly we have readers who do and then pass it up the line. That's worth pursuing. We want to try to encourage one of the aspects of the magazine, which is the discovery of talent. Sixty or 70 years ago, a fiction editor named Katharine White discovered John Cheever. It happens. It doesn't happen every week. It maybe doesn't happen even every year. A discovery of a writer such as John Cheever may happen once in a lifetime.

The New Yorker, in recent years, has released a great deal of material from the archive in book form. Last year, the DVD-ROM came out with every issue formatted in easy-to-access files. Can you tell me how these projects came to light?

The most popular of these brand extensions is the huge cartoon book. In sheer terms of popularity and sales, it probably sold more than anything else. Why? It's obvious. It's because the thing we need most in life, so that we don't throw ourselves out of a window, is humour. You and I both know that the first thing people look at when they read The New Yorker is the cartoons. To have them all in one book and on two disks is a kind of miracle of modern publishing, and we're really thrilled to be able to use that new technology.

We did the DVD thing for two reasons. One, because we started to feel sorry for all those people who might have been saving those New Yorkers that were smouldering in their basements and threatening to burst into spontaneous flames and kill everybody. Now you have this stack of disks that is as big as a grilled cheese sandwich. And secondly, the hope is that we then take this digitised New Yorker - which is a painstaking process - and put it online to figure out some way to make it work financially. Enormous credit for a lot of these things has to go to people like Pam McCarthy, who is the deputy editor, and Ed Klaris. But everybody contributes.

I think the miracle of The New Yorker - and it's independent of anybody else - is that most magazines have a moment if they're successful. Life magazine had this extended moment that played a huge role in the popular culture of the United States. It was a kind of image repository of popular culture. It lived on far past its time. The Partisan Review was a quarterly that never had a circulation of more than 5,000, but its intellectual impact in the United States in the late Forties and Fifties was extraordinary. Now, it was also published in the Eighties and Nineties, but it didn't have anywhere near the impact.

The New Yorker is unusual in that it's been around for 80 years and it keeps having these extended moments. That's very unusual in the history of publishing. It's hard to do. It means that you can never afford, as the editor, to be a curator of something that was wonderful in the past.

It's fantastic that this magazine had great moments when Thurber and White were publishing, and it's fantastic that the magazine had great moments when Liebling and Mitchell were publishing, too - pick your favourites. But I don't come to work in the morning, and neither does anybody else here, thinking about Liebling and Mitchell. If you play for the Yankees, you're not thinking about Lou Gehrig or Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle all the time. It would be foolish. You'd become a nostalgia addict.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in 'Stop Smiling' magazine (www.stopsmilingonline.com); J C Gabel is the editor-in-chief of 'Stop Smiling'

David Remnick's 'Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker' is published by Picador at £18.99

From DC to NYC via Moscow: Remnick's Life and Times

David Remnick is best known as the editor of The New Yorker - a position he has held for eight years - but he is also one of the most insightful and accomplished reporters of his generation. Starting out in 1981 at the Washington Post, straight from college, Remnick rose through the ranks, writing for almost every department until he volunteered for the paper's Moscow bureau. It was a decision that would lead to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories collected in his first book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, in 1993.

In 1992, after a 10-year stint at the Post, Remnick joined The New Yorker, where he was a reporter and profile-writer. Six years later, he succeeded Tina Brown as the editor of the weekly magazine that has had only five editors during its rich, 81-year history.

Born in 1958, Remnick grew up in New Jersey. His father was a dentist, and his mother an art teacher. He graduated with a degree in comparative literature from Princeton University. In addition to Lenin's Tomb, he has written four other books: The Devil Problem: And Other True Stories; Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia; King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero; and, most recently, Reporting, a collection of his writing from his 15 years at The New Yorker.